3 things you can only do with Microsoft Edge Copilot

While ChatGPT was there a few months before Copilot (called Bing Chat at the time), the inspiring Super Bowl commercial made a lot of people switch over and have the advanced GPT-4 model for free! If you haven’t seen the commercial, check it out below before we show you what Microsoft Edge Copilot can do for you.

Copilot is available everywhere

Let me start by saying that Microsoft Copilot is available everywhere, from the web by simply going to https://copilot.microsoft.com/, to an app on every mobile device (iOS, iPadOS, Android) and even inside Windows Copilot and the Microsoft Edge browser. While most entry points offer the same features, one stands out: using Copilot in the Microsoft Edge Sidebar gives us additional capabilities. You can access Copilot in the Edge Sidebar by clicking the Copilot icon at the top right side of the screen.

Edge Copilot understands what you’re looking at

Microsoft Edge Copilot has a superpower allowing it to access the current page or document you are looking at! This can be turned off by simply going to the settings, but you might not want to do that after I show you what you can do with it.

1. Using Copilot to summarize webpages and documents

Since Copilot has access to the current page, you can use it to interact with the data inside the page. You can ask it to generate a page summary, and Copilot will get to work and create an excellent page summary for you. Check out the image below (or why not try it yourself as well – none of this requires a license).

One of the amazing things Copilot does is that it references where it got the information from. This way, if you see something you’re interested in during the summary and want to dive deeper, you can easily find that part of the content. For me, it’s also been helpful to see if Copilot is telling me the truth, as it takes a bit of time to “trust” it to the point where I no longer need to check the document. But, in my experience, summarizing content is one of the things that GenAI models are excellent at.

Since Edge Copilot can read PDF documents, you could open up a PDF document in Edge and ask it not only to summarize the document but also ask more in-depth questions such as, “What does this document say about [insert your topic]?”

Remember that once you can access the page’s content, you can use Copilot to do anything around it. Does your boss want you to share the company blog posts on LinkedIn or X, but you want to spend your time on something other than reading them? Just ask Copilot to create those social updates for you.

2. Using the Copilot in Edge Compose Box

Copilot in Microsoft Edge has a Compose Box near the chat box, making it easier for everyday users to create excellent content. The Compose Box gives us certain options to specify the Tone, Format, and Length of the content we want to create.

While this doesn’t do any “magic” behind the scenes, it simply adds those parameters to your prompt before it’s sent to the Large Language Model. This makes it easier to ask what you need without specifying all those parameters in your initial prompt. If you are logged in with a Work account, you will see even more options, including LinkedIn Post, Summary, and Report.

3. Using Edge Copilot to summarize YouTube videos

We have only talked about written content, but what about video content? So much of the content we consume daily is video now that having a Copilot for that would be awesome. Well, don’t worry! Most videos on the web now have transcripts, either AI-generated or added captions, and we can use Copilot to help us summarize videos. In this example, I navigated to a YouTube video I did about Microsoft Teams Ownership with fellow MVP Drew Madelung and asked Copilot to summarize the video for me.

Bonus: Can we use Microsoft Edge Copilot with Microsoft 365 data?

Someone asked me if, given Copilot can understand the context of the page, we could use it in a way to replace Copilot for Microsoft 365. Before we go and try this, I want to highlight the importance of using Microsoft Copilot with Commercial Data Protection, which makes sure that your data is not mingled with web data, and that the data is not used to train the AI model behind. We want your organization’s IP to remain your IP. You know you are using Copilot with Commercial Data Protection if you see the Protected signs in green that confirm that your personal and company data are protected in this chat.

Since we do not have a Copilot in Lists (at least for now) I decided to go to a List with sample data and ask it for information about my list. Copilot was able to understand the data in my list and tell me the answer.

But while this works on Lists – I found it doesn’t work on all other apps, so when I tried going to a Word Document – it couldn’t access the page’s content. After those tests, I realized we could not use it to replace Microsoft 365 Copilot, which was purposely built to help us work with data in Microsoft 365.

Conclusion

Microsoft Copilot is the conversational chatbot that everyone can access directly on any device, whether on your desktop or mobile device, in Windows or the Edge browser. Copilot gives us many capabilities in every single app – but Copilot in Edge has the superpower of understanding the context and content of the page you are currently on. Some of the things we are now able to do are:

• Summarizing a page or a document 
• Summarizing a video 
• Extracting key information from the content (and you can keep asking questions to dive deeper into what you’re interested in) 
• You can even create social posts for a particular network based on the content
• Using the Compose Box to quickly create original content such as Reports, Summaries, LinkedIn Posts, and more!  
• Summarize YouTube videos to extract the most important parts 
• And much more.

Always use Copilot with Commercial Data Protection to safeguard your company information and check for accuracy. Even if it is fantastic, it isn’t perfect and can make mistakes. To finish on a funny note – I asked Copilot to see if it can make jokes based on my latest blog post on Syskit, and… Well, I will let you decide!